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CHALLENGES of AMBIGUITY Doing Comparative History With GERMAN HISTORICAL INSTITUTE WASHINGTON, D.C. ANNUAL LECTURE SERIES No. 4 CHALLENGES OF AMBIGUITY Doing Comparative History With comments by Carl N. Degler and John A. Garraty BERG PUBLISHERS NEW YORK·OXFORD German Historical Institute Washington, D.C. Annual Lecture Series No. 4 Challenges of Ambiguity Doing Comparative History Erich Angermann In Making Historical Comparisons Focus on Common National Issues Carl N. Degler Comparative History: Beyond Description to Analysis John A. Garraty BERG New York/Oxford First published in 1991 by Berg Publishers, Inc. 165 Taber Avenue, Providence, R.I. 02906, U.S.A. 150 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1J1, UK for the German Historical Institute 1607 New Hampshire Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009, U.S.A. © German Historical Institute 1991 Printed in the United States of America Preface In presenting the German Historical Institute’s Fourth Annual Lecture I am most pleased to point out that we were able to assemble for this occasion three historians with impressive records in dealing with the both fascinating and difficult problem of comparative history. Our main speaker was Erich Angermann from Cologne. Since the early 1960s, he has established at the University of Cologne a center for the study of English and American history which is unique in Germany. He is not only the author of Robert von Mohl and other works on modern German history, but also of Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, vol. 7 of Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag—Weltgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, which is a bestseller in the field, and he has written and edited other texts which are widely used by German students of American history. In the 1970s and 1980s, Erich Angermann conceived the plans for and organized a series of conferences in which he brought together American and German historians in order to analyze and compare developments in the Old World and the New. Furthermore, Erich Angermann has to be given tribute for his energy, his perseverance, and his imagination in establishing the German Historical Institute in Washington. He was a member of the committee that laid the foundations for and defined the task of the Institute. Since its foundation in 1987, he has served as chair of the Institute's Academic Advisory Council (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat) and as a member of the Institute's Board of Trustees (Stiftungsrat). I should like to use this occasion to thank him for all the time that he has invested in the Institute’s affairs and for all the help and good advice that he has given us. Over the past three decades, Erich Angermann has shown a keen interest in comparative history. Having done research into iv Preface both European and American history, and having published widely in both fields, he is extremely well qualified to tackle and overcome the problems in this most complex and complicated field. Therefore, I was very grateful that he decided to share with us in our Fourth Annual Lecture what ―Doing Comparative History‖ means and how the ―Challenges of Ambiguity‖ may be mastered. I am equally grateful to our two commentators, Carl Degler from Stanford, and John Garraty from Columbia, both of whom have experienced the ambiguity of the challenge of doing comparative history. Carl Degler has published important works in which he compared race relations in the United States and Brazil, as well as on the history of women and the family; John Garraty has come forth with highly interesting studies on the causes and consequences of the Great Depression comparing the United States and Germany in the 1930s. As we can observe, much of the historical work done still concentrates on analyzing and describing national problems, regional developments, or local structures and events. Therefore, in order to provide standards for judgment and evaluation, comparative history is and remains an assignment of the highest priority. It is our hope that our Fourth Annual Lecture not only advises and cautions with regard to the problems that have to be mastered, but also encourages those interested in comparative history and stimulates their desire to be successfully engaged in this most challenging field. HARTMUT LEHMANN Washington, D.C., February 1991 Challenges of Ambiguity Doing Comparative History Erich Angermann One of my favorite tales is about one Elizabethan gentleman. From his travels in France, he reported that people there were so poor that even the well-to-do had to eat frogs and snails, that is grenouilles and escargots. Evidently, a less insular mode of observation might have opened up more discreet ways to discover and enjoy the peculiarities of French cuisine. In other words, he failed to take advantage of the challenges of ambiguity, to evoke his friends’ imagination as to the hidden mysteries behind so strange an observation. So it is with all comparative history, I believe, and in fact with all foreign history, which can scarcely avoid comparison with our own: The most important caveat is to refrain from applying preconceived theories, from jumping to rash conclusions, and from cherishing our own notions of ―normalcy.‖ To keep our minds open for the ―otherness‖ of other people and their historical heritage—their Sonderwege, as it were—is a most exciting human experience, and it might be even more rewarding to detect regularities, devise sophisticated theories, or produce causal explanations. This I want to discuss in my talk, and I hope you will not be too disappointed by my lack of interest in theoretical history, cognitive patterns, social scientist generalizations, and God knows what. I am strongly interested, though, in historical professionalism, that is, in methodological sensitivity I do not wish to freight this paper with a full-scale bibliography, since I do not pretend to anything like a comprehensive treatment of so difficult a subject. There is already a surfeit of literature on it, but this is not the occasion to discuss it in detail, as much of it would deserve. So the following notes merely indicate some of the sources of information which I found particularly thought-provoking. 2 Erich Angermann and circumspection, a truly historical perspective, an ability that might be called ―sober imagination,‖ a gift for intersubjective communication of one’s ideas in a rhetoric both understandable and evocative, a sense of the tentative nature of all human knowledge, and similar virtues of a good historian. At this point I must needs pay tribute to J.H. Hexter. When I chose the title of my talk from a list of possible formulations suggested by my good friend Daniel J. Leab (of course a professional historian!), I was barely aware how close my own ideas were to those Jack Hexter expounded in several witty books, notably Doing History and The History Primer (both 1971).1 But rereading his essays greatly enhanced and confirmed my own thoughts, and I only wish I could emulate his wit and wisdom. So at least I borrowed and adapted his felicitous phrase as the subtitle of this lecture. I certainly share his predilection for doing and enjoying history over theorizing about it. I shall therefore not review other historians’ view on, or practice of, comparative historical studies, admirable as some of these works are.2 I shall 1 Cf. J. H. Hexter, Doing History (Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1971); idem, The History Primer (New York, 1971; London, 1972); idem, Reappraisals in History: New Views on History and Society in Early Modern Europe, 2d ed. (Chicago and London, 1979). There are of course a lot of other studies on historical thought, such as Michael Kammen, Selvages & Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987). But I must not indulge in extensive quoting. 2 To mention but a few names, one would obviously think of the pertinent works of George M. Frederickson, Peter Kolchin, Carl N. Degler, John A. Garraty, Peter R. Shergold, and James T. Kloppenberg on the American side, or Jürgen Kocka for Germany. Good overviews are presented by George M. Frederickson,"Comparative History," in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 457–73; Peter Kolchin, ―Comparing American History,‖ in ―The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects,‖ Reviews in American History 10 (1982): 64–81; Raymond Grew, ―The Case for Comparing Histories,‖ American Historical Review (1980): 763–78, and the subsequent debate; most recently A. A. van den Braembussche, ―Historical Explanation and Comparative Method: Towards a Theory of the History of Society,‖ History and Theory 28 (1989): 1–24; see also C. Vann Woodward, ed., The Comparative Approach to American History (New York, 1968), especially his introductory and dosing chapters, 3– 17, 370–90. On the German side, see for example, Theodor Schieder, "Möglichkeiten und Grenzen vergleichender Methoden in der Geschichtswissenschaft," Historische Zeitschrift 200 (1965): 529–51. Challenges of Ambiguity 3 rather expose to your criticism my own experience of trial and error in practicing comparative history. We surely need not bother about the details of a long and often wearisome way. But a few general observations will be in order. I started out dabbling in comparative approaches to certain aspects that appeared to be germane to American as well as German history—pretty unsystematic and risky adventures into a terra incognita, which fascinated my imagination all the more (for better or worse!). The first of these essays, in 1964, tried to relate Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to the medieval and early modern conceptual tradition of the mutuality of protection and allegiance, the contrasting images of the godly prince and the tyrant, and the right, nay the duty to throw off despotic government, albeit not without giving due notice.
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